Michael Schmidt: Selected Poems

By Michael Schmidt

The Selected Poem ebooks are a new 'digitalonly' series drawn from the works of smith|doorstop poets published during the last 26 years.

Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University and a Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge. He is a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, and a founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review. An anthologist, translator, critic and literary historian, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received an O.B.E. in 2006 for services to poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Poetry Business
• Release date: Dec 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781910367148

Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University, where he is convenor of the Creative Writing Programme. He is a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, and a founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review. An anthologist, translator, critic and literary historian, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received an O.B.E. in 2006 for services to poetry.

Book preview

from Desert of the Lions (1972)

Away

He left the room abruptly

dreaming, on a horse.

Still in bed of course

he rode, rode to the sea.

Behind him, his life strung

mile-lengths of wire back

over sand to a shack

where a telephone rang

unanswered. At the sea-side

water made no sound.

Deaf conches strewed the sand.

Seabirds on still air rode

above giant turtles, thick

headed, like fists or a thought.

Silence caught:

the rider could not come back.

His wife grunted in sleep

her dream of housework done.

In its moon-cradle his sin

slept its tiny clenched sleep.

The sea, silent and plain,

lay like a field of weed.

He dismounted and did

what a man will do in pain.

He took off coat and shirt.

He took off skin and bone.

He spread them out on stone:

rose, hyacinth, and heart.

Scorpion

for John Schmidt

Under its stone, it pleats

and unpleats ebony, it digs

a bed which is a body-print

exactly, room for pincer, tail

and sting. If it elbows out, it leaves

cold accurate evidence of tenancy.

Bedded with it, less precise,

ambling grubs and sloe-worms

eat and burrow deep sometimes

as earthworms, never disturbing

that fast eel of their element –

its nerves flinch at a grain’s shift.

I follow you hunting with jar and trowel,

with gloves, this poison tail. Each time

you turn the right stone up--warm flat stones

which roof an airless square of dark

and hold all night the sun’s warmth

for the black king-pin of the poor soil.

The stone raised, the creature poises

tense and cocked. Tail curled, it edges

forward, edges backward -- its enemy

so big he is invisible (though a child)

hunched over it, who trembles too

at such a minute potency.

And you flick it with the trowel

into the jar, where it jerks and flings

its fire in all directions at hard

transparency. It asks no mercy.

You bear it to an anthill, tip it on the dust.

Like a cat it drops right side up,

into a red tide of pincers. It twitches its tail

to a nicety and twice stings itself –

to death. Piece by piece it is removed

underground by the ants -- a sort of burial –

perhaps to be reassembled as a kingly effigy

somewhere deeper than we care to think

bound homeward with our empty jar:

and the field, full of upturned stones.

from My Brother Gloucester (1976)

Words

(after Hofmannsthal)

Child, your eyes will darken soon with wonder --

and darken ignorantly till they’re blind.

We will pass by you as we were passed by.

The fruit is bitter. It will sweeten in the dark

and drop into your hands with broken wings.

Cherish it a day. But it will die.

The wind comes down to you from history.

It chilled us too. The phrases it repeats

are stale with pleasure, stale with punishment.

The paths lead from the garden to the world,

to places where light burns among the trees

that raise their wings but cannot hope to fly.

Who cast the root of everything so deep

that nothing flies away that we can name?

Why can we laugh and in a moment cry

and give a name to laughter and to tears?

What is the illness that our eyes grow dark?

-- We are men because we are alone

we touch and speak, but silence follows words

the way a shadow does, the hand draws back. -

The curtain blows and there is no one there.

What removed you to this solitude,

into this common light, this common twilight?

It is that word, twilight, that called you down --

a word the wind has handed on to us

undeciphered, and it might be love --

rich with a honey pressed from hollow combs.

My Town

It’s as though the whole town is on ice.

Skaters with a speed of birds

greet each other on reflected cloud

mid-stream, up-stream, past the crippled boats.

There is a horse and sledge.

A bonfire burns its censer shape into the cold.

Someone sells grilled fish

again today: it’s weeks the river froze,

and a man dared walk out

on the water. No one’s looked back

since, ice-fishermen

with saw and string, schools

of children, the slower

shopkeepers like large sedate fish.

The habitual town has ceased. It’s chosen

another better world, a world of days

prayed for, persistent beyond hope,

a flowering of impossibilities.

Buildings line the shore

derelict like plundered sea-chests

and the pirate is the ice.

I tie on my skates and find the air

moves me like a feather from the shore.

I leave town for the frozen falls.

I fly up-stream, I come home

and pass by for the sea, and turn again.

Sun sparks my blades, I send up

grit of ice like quick flame.

But today the air is warmer, our days

are numbered. The falls are dripping

and the sea barks and barks

into the brittle river mouth. It’s like

sailing at the end of a brief world, beyond

responsibility, and time is purposeless,

pure of daily history and bread.

To put on wings is an authentic dream, and yet

up on shore the dirtied nest of facts

is patient in the sun, tall and lowering

above the vistas of the heart, and even now

beneath the ice the other world continues

undisturbed, the weeds are spun by currents,

the small fish feed, are fed on,

the great round-eyed flounder old as water

subsist on certainties among stilled keels

and out to sea, by rough boulders and the light,

the wrecked laden hulls, the mariners . . .

If the inhabitants of that world look up

they perceive hairline cracks, and our veined

shadows pass against the light like baits

they will not take, but wait -- acolytes, whose business

is each candle and the dark.

The English Lesson

(after Pasternak)

When it was Desdemona’s turn to sing

and only minutes of her life remained,

she did not mourn her star, that she had loved:

she sang about a tree, a willow tree.

When it was Desdemona’s time to sing

her voice grew deeper, darker as she sang;

the darkest, coldest demon kept for her

a weeping song of streams through rough beds flowing.

And when it was Ophelia’s turn to sing

and only minutes of her life remained,

she was dry as light, as a twig of hay:

wind blew her from the loft into the storm.

And when it was Ophelia’s time to sing,

her dreams were waning, all but the dream of death.

Bitter and tired -- what tokens sank with her?

In her hair wild celandine, and willows in her arms.

Then letting fall the rags of human passion,

heart-first they plunged into the flowing dark,

fracturing their bodies like white tinder,

silencing their unbroken selves with stars.

The Sleigh

(after a theme of Turgenev)

The colours have gone out.

It is like death -- blind white

and the sun is white: we speed

the way we always wished --

a sleigh, the harness bells -- across the snow.

It’s not what we expected.

Afraid on the ice road

we ring to the empty farms

that we’ve come their way but not to stop.

Who set the burning pennies on our eyes?

Think -- if the runners struck a rut

and hurled us into temporary graves

face-down like heretics; or if the jingling

ceased and we flew silently

on into the open throat of night.

Speed and the snow

blend field and hedge and landmark

in one whiteness like a future.

Perhaps the thaw will turn it up like new --

and yet we cannot see that far today.

Under the arcane dunes

suppose the past is unreclaimable

too truly for March sun and its tired miracle.

What if a half-hearted wish for warmth

is all we bring ourselves, and bring no love

hot to melt the things it cannot love?

What if we trust all changes to the snow?

I think the snow will see us off:

we’re going to die

whirling, two flakes

of headlong colour

over the unmarked brink.

In a flash of white, as though we are to hang,

we shall relive our separate short lives.

-- We have not touched or taken

the feather weight of pain.

If it was war, then we were traitors there.

If it was famine, we ate on and on; and now

we’re turned to cowards in a day we owned,

returned as serfs to fields we ruled as czars,

we plough the snow where once

we led the hunt through hedge and stream-bed

up to the lodge and there were ladies there.

It is neglect and snow leave open graves

we ride from to worry at a world

we partly chose, and where

forgetfulness makes easy graves we go

across a brilliance like purity

to no known place.

The driver turns and points but we are blind.

I dread a destination and the thaw

that will set us down and leave us to ourselves

as we are now. We are

the dying penitent who feels too late

the cold breath of the beggar on his hand.

I wish I could look on

rather than be here a piece of blindness.

I would not call

to those who go together

and seem upon the snow as cold as snow,

but from a distant cottage I